Many of today's games and simulations facilitate multiple players simultaneously participating in the same instance of the game. The multiplayer aspect of such games provides an enriched gaming experience, wherein players may communicate, collaborate, compete against one another, and/or otherwise interact with and affect each other and their shared collective gaming environment. The players in a multiplayer game may be connected via a network, such as a local area network (LAN), a wide area network (WAN), or the internet.
In order for players in a networked multiplayer game to interact in a sensible manner, they must constantly send to each other updates about the state of objects in the game. For example, one player may move his character's position from a first position to a second position, and this position change must be communicated to the other players in a timely fashion in order for the game to proceed in a realistic manner. Naturally, as the number of players in a game increases, so the amount of state change information being generated and sent from each player to every other player will increase linearly with player count. This means that a 256 player game will require roughly eight times as much bandwidth as a 32 player game.
However, bandwidth is not an unlimited resource, and players typically have predetermined bandwidth limitations depending on the nature of their network connections. These bandwidth limitations may be directly regulated by internet service providers (ISPs) or result from other factors such as the type of networking equipment utilized by a given user. Hence, under conventional methods, facilitating a large number of players in the same networked multiplayer game can be problematic because a substantial amount of bandwidth will be required to facilitate smooth game play.
In sum, there is a need for a method to accommodate a large number of players in a networked multiplayer game, while maintaining a quality gaming experience for each player despite limited bandwidth. It is in this context that embodiments in accordance with the invention arise.